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Welcome to OPS335 - Open System Application Server

What This Course is About

This course teaches the maintenance and administration of a UNIX server using Linux. Students will learn to install configure, customize, test and maintain common services available on Linux servers.
This course is the third in a series of courses about Linux technologies.

ULI101 taught you to be a Linux user.

OPS235 taught you to move from being a Linux user to being a Linux system administrator.

As a system administrator, you will be responsible for installing, configuring, adjusting, maintaining, and troubleshooting the operation of Linux network services. You will potentially have several hundreds (or thousands) of people depending on the machines that you manage. This is a lot of responsibility, and with that responsibility comes power. You will be able to change anything on the system, and you will also have the ability to damage or destroy the system.

In this course you use a removable disk pack with the lab computers to set up a Linux system. You will also set up several additional Linux systems using virtual machines, and therefore gain experience with different types of system configurations as well as setting up networking between systems.

Learning by Doing

Most of the learning in this course occurs through the hands-on problem solving that takes place in the labs and assignments. Therefore, it's very important to stay up-to-date with the coursework, and to practice until you have confidently mastered each task.

All of the software used in this course is open source software, so you are free to use, modify, and redistribute it. This means that you can install it as many times as you want on as many different computers as you would like. It also means that you can tinker with it -- you can take it apart, see how it works, and put it back together in the same or a different way, limited only by your time and ambition. You are encouraged to experiment and question liberally.